I’ve discovered the secret purpose of the various bits of infrastructure in my apartment here in Mexico City: it’s to make me look like a fool. This only dawned on me yesterday, but the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that I’m right. And I’m feeling pretty foolish right about now. Circumstances are making me look bad. Not merely bad, but kind of high-maintenance, whiny bad. If you’re a guy who considers himself pretty handy around the house, this isn’t a good thing.

By infrastructure, I really mean plumbing and electricity. Shockingly, electricity was the first to ambush me. Shortly after moving in, the power went out early one morning. Noting that the electricity was on elsewhere in the building, I went to the breaker box to reset it. It didn’t appear to have been tripped, but I flipped the switch anyway. Nothing happened. I tried a couple of more times, again with the same result. So I broke down and called Rafael, my landlord and explained the situation. He came out in his pajamas, flipped the circuit breaker on and off once, and Lo! There was electricity. I was mortified and apologized while simultaneously re-explaining that I had done the very same thing.

Some months later, after more power failures, and some alarming sizzling sounds coming from the breaker box, we found out what the problem was. The circuit breaker itself had a loose connection inside the box. Once replaced, it has worked fine ever since. Though I was indeed vindicated, the fact of the matter is that impressions of idiocy don’t really wear off that fast. Especially when they keep getting refreshed.

So once the electricity left off tormenting me, the plumbing took over. Take the water supply, for example. In my apartment it stops with alarming regularity. Of course it’s the typical, failure-prone Mexican system, where water slowly flows from the city pipes into a cistern under the patio. From there it’s pumped up to a tinaco on the roof from where it flows leisurely into the pipes via gravity. The whole setup runs on electricity and a set of cantankerous float valves, electrical sensors, and relays, all of which suffer from the same “Transylvanian” maintenance schedule. Which is to say that they are replaced or serviced only after they fail. Of course when there’s no electricity, the whole system runs on borrowed time anyway.

Only a few weeks after my electrical run-in, the water stopped and I called Rafael: “I don’t have any water.”

“Don’t worry; the system is back on. You should have water in 20 minutes,” he replied confidently. I was relieved he was already onto the problem. Twenty minutes later, I tried the faucets. No water. I merely heard a gentle sucking sound. The system was pulling in air as water somewhere below me flowed out. I tried all the faucets. Same result. I waited another five minutes and tried again. Same result again. So I went downstairs to talk to Rafael, who happened to be in his shop.

“It’s working,” he insisted.

“No, it’s not,” I replied. “I just tried it before I came down here. There’s no water.”

“Let me show you,” he said, walking toward the sink in his shop. He turned the valve and to my horror, water flowed out exuberantly.

“Yeah,” I said, “but that’s just water that’s already in the pipes. There’s no water in my apartment.”

“It’s fine,” he insisted. “Go back and check it again.” Meanwhile the water kept flowing out of the faucet. I could feel my embarrassment rising and hoped I wasn’t blushing.

Sure enough, I returned to my apartment and the water flowed almost as if nothing had happened. I felt foolish and could almost hear the pipes quietly snickering to themselves, “foolish gringo, hahaha!” It’s nasty when plumbing makes fun of you, but I figured this was to be my last insult. After all, how many times can this kind of weird, intermittent problem occur? And to me, who normally has such good mechanical Karma?

Ah, if only! Recently, my toilet flush valve started leaking. Intermittently, of course. Again I notified Rafael, who sent up his handyman, Arturo. Since I couldn’t see anything wrong with the valve, I persuaded myself and Arturo that the problem was the flush handle getting stuck against the tank lid. He duly replaced it. That was about six weeks ago. But it turns out that wasn’t the problem. So Arturo came back and looked again, and we both decided it really must be the valve. I felt rather foolish at having misdiagnosed the problem initially, but Arturo was too polite to comment. But he did go buy a valve. Meanwhile, actually installing the valve seems to have fallen by the wayside, and guess what? Now the toilet appeared to have fixed itself. But don’t tell anyone as they still think the valve needs to be replaced, and my plumbing credibility is hanging by a thread.

Oh, and I had an intermittent problem with the hot water too. Like in the middle of a shower, suddenly the hot water would slow to a trickle. Mind you, the cold still worked fine. That was such a weird problem even I couldn’t imagine what was wrong. Later, after my cold shower, I’d check the hot water and it’d be fine again. But now when I told Rafael, he didn’t believe me. “Maybe the hot water doesn’t like you,” he said, chuckling. It took me a week of hot/cold/hot showers to persuade him that I wasn’t imagining this problem. When he finally looked into it, he apologized and said I was right. That particular problem now seems to be fixed.

Then about a month ago, my shower started leaking. Not a lot, but definitely leaking. So, figuring I’d give Rafael all the facts and let him decide what to do, I stuck a bucket under it to measure the flow and then sent Rafael an e-mail: “my shower is leaking about 1.5 liters a day. I personally don’t really care if you fix it or not, but I’m letting you know.” I never heard back from him, figured he didn’t care about a small leak, so I resigned myself to a leaky shower.

Since I don’t particularly like to waste water, I left the bucket under the leak and started to use it to flush the toilet. But the sound of the dripping water began to annoy me, especially as the bucket in the shower stall created an odd sort of resonance, making the sound MUCH louder than anyone might imagine. And then, perhaps fortunately, the shower began to leak in earnest earlier this week. Now it was leaking 3 liters an hour, and even using the captured water to flush the toilet, a lot of it was ending up going down the drain. So this time I messaged Rafael on WhatsApp, and he agreed to send Arturo around on Monday.

So what’s happened since? Yesterday the shower fixed itself, and now it’s not leaking at all.

Dateline: Dealing with an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

Due to the celebration of Constitution day on Monday, Mexico kicked off this workweek on Tuesday, groundhog day, which turns out to be completely fitting for the next installment of my quixotic efforts to find an apartment.

Last we left our expat-wannabe, was Friday night when “la mensa de las ventas,” (idiot agent) had sent him an e-mail at 8:13 PM on Friday night, claiming she could not open the encrypted file he had sent a good six hours earlier. As this was the last of many straws on an already-beleaguered camel, only good manners kept our hero from screaming epithets out loud in multiple languages in a packed restaurant, though he was severely tempted.

But after a calming three-day weekend, Tuesday morning dawned, full of promise. Unlike the prior days, the sun came out, shone and warmed the city up to a comfortable mid-70’s temperature. Birds were singing and flowers were blooming. What could go wrong?

I texted María, the agent, in the morning and reminded her that I was eager to finish up with the apartment deal. She texted me back in fairly short order that she was in a meeting with her bosses until 3:00, but that she would call me then, and wished me a good day. With the prompt response and cordial ending, my hope was renewed. Surely we’d get this deal done today.

Since I didn’t want to give her any shred of an excuse to blame mefor delays, I decided to go to Banamex to make the $1,000MXN (peso, about $55 USD) deposit requested late on Friday. After standing in line for about 25 minutes (first time for me in a bank branch in about 25 years), I finally approached a teller. I told her what I needed to do, and then whipped out my cell phone showing the e-mail from the agent with all of the relevant account information. I was not going to make any transcription errors. Nope. I handed the phone to the teller.

She read the numbers a couple of times and keyed them in, but looked frustrated. Finally, I offered to read them off to her while she typed. Still nothing. So she called her supervisor. He tried the numbers several times, but to no avail. I asked if they could look up the account by name. Nope. Then he turned to me and said it was an invalid account number. I said, “You know, I’m really not surprised. Sorry to waste your time.” I then turned on my heel, and laughed all the way out of the bank. Of course! This comedy could not have proceeded in any other way, could it?

So I sent María an e-mail explaining the situation. Then more hilarity ensued. I promptly got a reply back from her: “It’s impossible that the bank information is incorrect because that’s the account that all the other tenants deposit their rent in. By the way, the owners want a six-month minimum lease, too.” What?!?! We’d already spent two weeks talking about the fact that I wanted a 5 month lease, though six is not a deal-breaker. However, my already-thin patience wasn’t having a great day either.

I shot back a reply:

“What can I say? I didn’t copy down the account numbers you sent me. I brought my cell phone to the bank and showed them the e-mail YOU sent me on the screen of the phone. The teller tried to bring up the account, but couldn’t. Then she called her supervisor, who tried and failed too. The supervisor then told me it was an invalid account number. Perhaps you just mis-typed. It happens to us all. In any case, please call me so we can settle all the details including the term of the lease.

Many thanks,

Kim.”

This e-mail went out at approximately 3:39 PM. Still no promised 3:00PM phone call from the agent. I called both her office and her cell. No answer on either. I sent a text message to her phone. Radio silence. At this point, I seriously considered going out to buy a can of spray paint in order to write on the front of the building how I really felt. But common sense prevailed and instead, I decided ‘the heck with this idiot,’ and began to look for a new place.

And the goddess, who seemingly had tired of this little game as much as I, decided to throw me a bone in the form of a furnished one-bedroom apartment in Roma Sur, right around the corner from a penthouse that I’d been lusting after for a while. And this penthouse had inspired me to already have done a ton of due diligence on the neighborhood, so I knew it’d be a good place to live. I phoned the number, and within a few minutes, I had a meeting to see the place not a half-hour later.

Looks like my luck may be changing. But I’m not going to write anything else about this place until I have a signed lease, lest I jinx it.

San Francisco. Seattle. Portland. Los Angles. San Diego. Houston. Baltimore. New York City. What do all these cities have in common? They were territory I’d cover during a typical Monday-to-Friday marketing trip in the late ‘90’s when I worked as an analyst for a brokerage firm based in Boston. Usually the trip would start with a weekend flight to the West Coast, and then a 5:00 AM client breakfast on Monday morning. We’d usually finish up with client dinners around 8:00-8:30 or so, only to start the grind again the next day. On the West Coast, we could do a lunch meeting, then catch a plane to the next city, and manage a dinner meeting the same night. Other afternoons and evenings were filled with flights to the next city. After a week of this, on Friday night I’d land at Boston’s Logan airport around 9:00PM, my mind reeling. A jerky taxi ride home from the airport, and then I’d be lucky to get to bed by 10:30, totally drained of energy, spirit, and the will to live.

So you can totally imagine that the slower pace of life in Mexico is one of the attractions to living here. And indeed, a slower pace of life can be appealing if that means no hurried commute, no horrific marketing trips, and a more relaxed way of life.

Here in Mexico City, despite the hustle and bustle, I’ve been experiencing my own slower pace of life, but I’m not sure I can take much more, frankly. Last Thursday, I went to look at a furnished apartment. After a couple of days, a veritable odyssey started when I decided I wanted to rent it. What follows is a relaxingly slow-paced timeline.

Monday 18 January

I find a furnished, one-bedroom apartment available in Colonia Cuauhtémoc for $12,000 pesos a month, about $660 USD. I contact the agent, María, and she agrees to show it to me the next day at 1:00 PM. I already know the neighborhood well and know it’s safe, quiet, and that I want to live there.

Tuesday 19 January

I see the apartment for the first time. Frankly, it’s close to perfect, but it’s the first one I’ve seen, so I don’t jump on it immediately, though I do go to some pains to sell myself to María, the agent. I emphasize that I’m stable, quiet, respectful of the neighbors, and that I have plenty of financial resources to pay the rent. I show her a recent brokerage statement and her eyes boggle. I also explain that I have no “fiador,” a Mexico City property owner who will guarantee my rent. But I do offer to pay for the five months I want in cash, in advance, and with a deposit. She seems to think we can work out a deal.

Wednesday 20 January

I look at a couple of other places, but none compare María’s apartment. One of the apartments is shown to me by a fast-talking Argentine woman whose accent throws me until I realize where she’s from. The place is dark, old, and cold enough to store sides of beef. I pass. That evening I go back to María’s apartment to check out the noise level at rush hour. All to the good. I chat with a neighbor who says the neighborhood is one of the best in the city and she loves living there.

Thursday 21 January

María emails me in the afternoon to ask if I’m still interested in the apartment. I e-mail back and tell her that while I’m not 100% decided, I’m interested enough that I want her to send me the rental agreement so I’ll have plenty of time to read it at my leisure. The last thing I want do is to have to sit in front of her in the office, reading this contract in Spanish for the first time, and being pressured to sign something I don’t fully understand or agree to.

Friday 22 January

María emails me the address of her office, since we had talked about me coming down that day to give a deposit. Turns out it’s about an hour south from me, in Guadalupe Inn, near UNAM. She sends me a copy of the contract. I e-mail her back telling her I’m looking at the contract, but I had no idea her office was so far away, and that I can’t get there to give her the money that afternoon because I’ve got a date with Roberto at 5:00. OK, I leave out the part about Roberto, but make it clear I have a commitment that prevents me from going to her office that afternoon. Turns out I don’t meet Roberto until 5:45, but ni modo. I promise that before Monday, I’ll send the contract with the proposed revisions. She promises we’ll meet Monday, and it sounds like all will be finalized then. I start to get excited. I’m moving to México!!! Yippee!!!

I start to round up six months of rent in cash. Fortunately, I have two ATM cards, one with a $1,000 USD daily withdrawal limit, and another with $500. Between the two, I should fairly easily be able to take out enough money over the weekend to pay for my apartment.

Unfortunately, the Bitch Goddess of Finance doesn’t quite see it that way. Friday night, ATM card #1 is rejected “due to my institution.” (Mexican ATM-speak.) Unfortunately, said “institution” is a two-bit California credit union that only answers its phone during weekday business hours, Pacific Time. And all the telephone voice prompts are recorded by valley-girl wannabes. Ugh! Fortunately, it’s the lower dollar limit of the two. The second card is a Schwab Bank card. I successfully get $11,000 pesos (about $600, USD) on the first try. But the attempt to get the remaining $400 is rejected “due to my institution.” Fortunately, Schwab is a world-class operation, and I can call them any time I want. So I go back to the hotel, boot my laptop, and call Schwab via Skype. They fix the problem. Unfortunately, I have to rerun this particular game with Schwab several times over the weekend as the fraud-detection software thinks I’m a scoundrel, no matter what the Schwab agents tell it.

Otherwise, the rest of the weekend passes uneventfully, at least apartment-wise.

Monday 25 January

I text María telling her I’ll go to her office that morning to give her 60,000 pesos, sign the contract, and we’ll be done. She says she’s sick, but can do it Tuesday.

Tuesday 26 January

I text María around 9:30 AM asking if we can talk by phone. I call her and we talk about the contract, my various objections. She says to write it all down and e-mail her. She’s in the office, though not 100% well.

I do my final, thorough review, and write a point-by-point letter explaining my various issues with the contract, which on close inspection seems to be somewhat sloppily written. (References to numbered clauses have the wrong number, an educated Mexican friend finds certain clauses as vaguely inexplicable as I do, etc.) I write a short e-mail explaining that I’ve put all my issues into a word document, and that I’ve also turned on “track changes” and made revisions to the contract in another word document. I send the e-mail at 11:32 am, with the attachments attached.

11:46 PM: She emails me back saying she can’t find the questions. I start to wonder about her intelligence.

12:01 PM: I e-mail her back telling her that everything she needed was in the attachments in the prior e-mail. Did she get it? (it was certainly in my “sent” box, and yes, the attachments were right there.)

12:04 PM: Figuring it won’t hurt, I re-send the documents in a separate e-mail and emphasize that all the questions and suggested modifications are in the attachments, which need to be downloaded and opened with Microsoft Word.

As the day winds down, I’m wondering why I haven’t heard a peep out of María. The changes seem simple enough. (I refuse to be responsible for a water heater breakdown on a 5-month lease, along with a couple of other, minor points.) But I figure I’ll let her get through her work. No doubt there’s some ridiculously complicated process going on behind the scenes. So I let it be, not wanting to be a nuisance.

Wednesday 27 January

I have heard nothing and start to worry. I know Mexicans don’t like confrontation, nor saying “no.” So I start to worry that the silence means that I’m being quietly rejected for this apartment. Maybe the water heater is as non-negotiable for them as it is for me? Who knows? I schedule a visit to another apartment in the same neighborhood. Meanwhile I’m starting to feel oddly desperate. There are few alternative apartments showing up on either Craigslist or Vivanuncios.com, my main sources. And the longer this takes, the longer I’m effectively committing to stay in Mexico. And I’m sick of restaurant food. And there’s no chair with a back in my hotel room, and whine, whine, whine. That evening I begin to panic.

Thursday 28 January

11:31 AM: I text María indicating I definitely want the apartment, and have they decided if they want me? I wait anxiously for a response. No text back. I wait about fifteen minutes and call María’s office and leave a message.

2:28 PM: María emails me (finally!) basically saying that I can have whatever I want in terms of contract modifications. I’m elated.

2:40 PM: I e-mail María back and basically say, “Terrific! We’re in agreement. Please send me the final copy of the rental agreement with my name on it, the exact rent, deposit, etc. I’m ready to move in tomorrow if we can get this done soon. By the way, I’m going out to lunch now, and can’t read e-mail away from my computer, but please text me if you send me the contract, and then I’ll go back and read it ASAP.”

3:33 PM: No reply to my earlier e-mail yet, so I text María’s cell phone saying I answered her e-mail, looks like we’re in agreement on the contract. Has she read my e-mail? Can we finalize the deal?I’m eager to move in.

3:37 PM: She texts back a terse, “OK.” I’m left wondering what exactly this means. Yes, we can finalize the deal? Yes, she got the e-mail, but hasn’t read it? Something else? Trying not to be a pest, I just spend the rest of the day kind of anxiously wondering what’s next.

11:59 PM, Midnight, I e-mail Maria: “Can we sign the contract on Friday the 29th? I have a meeting at 2:00 PM, but I can come by your office in the morning. Please send me the final copy of the contract at your earliest convenience.” I figure if she reads the email in the morning, there’s still a chance we can wrap up the deal Friday morning and I can be in my new apartment for the weekend. Maybe I can cook dinner for Roberto. My mind starts to race with fun possibilities.

Friday 29 January

I call María around 9:30 AM local time to find out what we need to do to put this baby to bed. She says she needs a copy of the first page of my passport. I say I can take a picture of it and e-mail it. But since I consider it to be highly personal information, I tell her that I’m going to put it into a Microsoft Word document that’s password protected. (I’ve already looked into the encryption and am satisfied that it will be safe there.) I tell her that she’ll need the password to open it, and I ask her if she has a pen. I tell her the password and then have her read it back to me.

She tells me she needs a deposit from me to guarantee the apartment. The deposit is only a thousand pesos, about fifty five dollars. Since her office is about an hour away from my hotel in the south of the city, I ask if there isn’t a bank account I can deposit the funds in, since I really don’t want to spend two hours to hand someone a thousand pesos in cash. She says yes, I can deposit it in a bank and she’ll e-mail me the information. I emphasize to her that I’ve got another meeting at 2:00, and that I’ll need the bank info fairly shortly so as to be able to make the deposit.

She also agrees to send me the final copy of the contract, and agrees to let me move into the apartment on Tuesday. (Monday’s a holiday here).

10:02 AM: I e-mail the passport photo, and write up the details of the conversation in the same e-mail so that there’s a written record of what I think she said, and close the e-mail with “please let me know at your earliest convenience if this summary is not what you said.”

10:46 AM: I text María: “I still don’t have the bank info.”

10:47 AM: She texts back, “OK, I’ll send the bank info right now.”

For the next couple of hours, I keep checking my e-mail for the bank information, but nothing.

1:15 PM: I leave my hotel for my lunch date with Julio at 2:00. We have a lovely lunch, during which I explain how long and complicated this rental transaction has become. He sighs and says something to the effect, “Look, I’m Mexican. I grew up here, but frankly, I don’t know why the simplest things often take so long to get done here. Let’s just say that that kind of thing is handled with more “agility,” in other countries.”

4:30 PM: I get back to my hotel and immediately boot up my computer looking for the e-mail with the bank information. It arrived with a timestamp of 2:35 PM: “No problem,” I figure, “Banamex is surely open until 5:00. I should be able to squeak in.”

4:45 PM: I arrive at Banamex to discover that they close at 4:00. I return to my hotel with a certain feeling of annoyance and disgust. “Jeeze, I practically was begging her this morning to send the darn thing. Why the heck did it take nearly five hours for the friggin’ bank info?,” I think. I told her that I’d need it sooner, and that I was going out to lunch. Why is she dragging her heels on this?

5:06 PM: I text her and explain that I was away from my computer when her e-mail arrived. (I didn’t remind her that I had explicitly told her that I’d be away from the computer at that time.) And explain that Banamex closes at 4:00, so I’ll give her the whole $60,000 pesos on Tuesday when I see her and sign the contract.

5:30 PM: Given how fraught this has all become, I overcome my fear of Google spying on my Yahoo e-mail and decide to install the Yahoo Mail app on my Mexican cell phone. Now I can get e-mail anywhere, anytime.

8:13 PM: I’m in a Pizza & Beer restaurant in Roma Norte enjoying what turns out to be one of the better pizzas I’ve had in Mexico when my cell phone indicates an e-mail. María is writing me to tell me she couldn’t open the encrypted file, and thus she can’t begin (“BEGIN???” I scream internally) the contract and so I’ll have to wait one more day until Wednesday to move in. I practically scream in the restaurant. “Why did this pendeja agent wait until the END OF THE FRIGGIN’ DAY to attempt to open an encrypted file? Given her trouble with the attachments, she’s obviously not particularly computer savvy. You think she’d have tried sooner.” I immediately e-mail her back reminding her of the password and immediately text her cell phone with the password in the increasingly likely case she forgot to write it down. No answer.

I’m feeling seriously annoyed at this point. I text Roberto looking for a little sympathy. He replies back with a funny little rhyme, “Así son las mensas de ventas aquí,” which roughly translates to “That’s the way the idiot real estate agents are here.” I feel a bit consoled and walk back to my hotel, dejected at the Kafkaesque, slow-motion process of my attempt to rent an apartment here.

Meanwhile, I’m left with a nagging feeling that this apartment could still slip away since I don’t have a signed contract.

So, yeah, if you want a slower pace of life, well then Mexico is for you! Just be careful of what you wish for. Saludos!

Some years ago, well after F and I were a definitive couple, we thought it’d be great if he could come and visit me in Boston. Though I had no intentions of subjecting him to winter (after all, I loved him), with his teacher’s schedule including summers off, coming for the summer seemed ideal. And it would save me some wear and tear, since I had been the one who always traveled to Mexico City. Not that I really minded. Mexico City is so different from Boston that it’s hard to even express. But let it suffice to say that the chaos, warmth (both climatic and personal), and nuttiness of Mexico City was the perfect antidote to a very high-pressure career in Boston, and I always cherished my time there.

Unlike most Mexicans, F had traveled extensively. He’d been to most of the countries in Western Europe, and at one point had a German boyfriend. I guess I wasn’t his first “exotic foreigner.” He’d also traveled in South America, Colombia principally, but I think he may also have visited Brazil. His passport was full of exotic stamps, and he always returned home to Mexico City. But he’d never been to the USA, and given his Mexican Leftist outlook, hadn’t been particularly desirous of going.

But once we were an “item,” the calculus changed. So we talked extensively about his coming to visit some day, and he finally acceded. I told him I would do everything possible to help him, though there wasn’t much I really could do. However (unbeknownst to my company), I wrote a letter on company letterhead explaining that F would come to the USA to visit me, and that I’d be responsible for him while he was here and that I’d ensure that he returned when he was supposed to. To my uneducated mind, this seemed like almost a sponsorship, something that suggested he wasn’t just going to cross the border willy-nilly and immediately begin illegally cutting lawns or (gasp!) selling tacos. He had a reason to visit the USA, and the fact that he’d been to many places in Europe and elsewhere also seemed to suggest he’d be unlikely to overstay his visa. I mean, if you’re not going to overstay a visa in Italy or Germany, why would you overstay in Boston?

Procedurally, if you’re a Mexican in Mexico City, getting a visa to the USA is a difficult and somewhat humiliating process. First you have to pay a non-refundable fee of about eighty dollars ($160 USD currently; thanks, JR!), then fill out a lengthy application with nearly your entire life story. Then, if you aren’t summarily rejected, you get an opportunity for an interview at our ugly, heavily-guarded embassy on Reforma in Mexico City.

Our Heavily Guarded Bunker of an Embassy in Mexico City

Do you get an appointment at a particular hour? No. Instead you get a day, and you are asked to show up at the embassy at the ungodly hour of 7:00 AM, where you take your place in a long line that often snakes around the block. After waiting for something approaching an hour, you are finally ushered into a waiting room, where you are given a number and then you wait further for your interview.

Ugly Fence on Reforma, Courtesy of US Embassy, visible behind the trees

F, who is not a morning person, showed up at the appointed time and had his interview, surprisingly in Spanish. (I guess Immigration is going soft these days.) And after all that trouble? He was summarily denied a visa on the spot. No review period, no “wait for the letter,” nothing suggesting any deliberation at all. When he asked why, he was handed a preprinted card stating that he had “not demonstrated sufficient ties to Mexico.” In short, one can only conclude that they thought he’d be likely to overstay his visa and become yet another illegal immigrant.

Now, I don’t know about the legal standard of “sufficient ties,” but F owns a condo outright where he has lived at least a decade, probably longer. He has a longstanding job teaching Spanish language and literature at a private high school. Though not married, he’s intimately tied to his family, spending every Sunday with his mother, brother and sister, along with various nieces. He’d also lived in DF virtually his entire life, so it’s not like he was some kind of drifter in Mexico either. And our relationship notwithstanding, he had zero desire to live in the USA. We were both stumped and mystified by his visa denial. So I suggested that he try again, which he did about a year later. Same result, same preprinted card with the same so-called reason to deny him.

At this point, I contacted an immigration attorney to see if there was anything else to be done. The attorney told me consular officials have almost complete discretion to deny entrance to anyone for any reason and that there was little we could do, especially in the case of a mere tourist visa. The only thing was that the attorney could write a formal letter to the US ambassador requesting a review of F’s case, but he thought it was a long shot. And at the end of the day, F, who had found the process humiliating and frustrating wasn’t keen to repeat the experience.

And I remained mystified. All of F’s friends who were similarly situated had been granted visas. Heck, even one of F’s co-workers at the same high school with a virtually identical set of circumstances had easily gotten a US visitor’s visa, yet F had been denied.

About a year later, I was attending a dinner party here in Boston, when the topic of visitor visas came up. My hostess knew a Brazilian/Gringa couple who had faced similar circumstances. The Gringa wanted her Brazilian lover to get a tourist visa, and he had been denied in a similar fashion to F. However, apparently this Gringa wasn’t as willing to take ‘no’ for an answer and did a lot of digging to better understand the situation. What she found out was that I, like Oedipus centuries before, had fulfilled the prophesy by tying to avoid it. Apparently the US Department of Immigration has a policy of denying visas to people they suspect have a love interest with an American citizen. Ostensibly such people are at higher risk of overstaying a visa than a mere tourist. Certainly they have reason. And so by trying to help with my “sponsorship letter,” I virtually ensured that F would be denied a visa. And that’s probably forever, though now that we’ve broken up, it’s probably more or less a moot point.

Moral of the story? If you want to help a Mexican or other foreigner to get a tourist visa, advise him or her to disavow any friendship with any gringo and instead state in the interview that he wants to go to Disneyland, go shopping, or some other touristic reason for going NOB. Because apparently part of the Immigration Department’s unstated mission is to impede any cross-border relationship that comes to their attention.

We are finally on the road to Mexico! Woo hoo!!! After what seemed like an endless set of ridiculous setbacks, we’ve finally weighed anchor and hit the road. However, true to form, it didn’t happen particularly early. Despite having planned this trip for a long time, the actual packing only came together at the last minute.

We awoke this morning at 3:00 AM, and couldn’t fall back to sleep until about 4:30. While we considered starting super early, it was only about 18°F outside, and we didn’t relish the idea of packing in the cold and dark. So we ate a little, then went back to bed and slept soundly until 7:30. After that, we got to serious packing.

Frozen Lake by MassPike – What we are leaving behind

We’ve never taken a road trip in a small truck before, and the luxury of so much space also led to some confusion or indecision. Should we take our beach chairs? If so, one or two? What if we make a new friend? Better to have two. Should we take the bicycle? In the end we took none of these things, but packed a lot anyway. With the luxury of extra space and no excess baggage fees, we packed three pairs of sandals, and two sets of regular shoes, ample quantities of clothes, and promised ourself that we’d buy a new set of athletic shoes somewhere along the way, probably in Houston. We also packed a cooler with milk, ½&½, coffee beans, cheese, salami, bananas, mineolas, bread, water, lemonade, and separately an electric kettle, coffee grinder, our favorite Provincetown coffee mug, purchased at the Human Rights Campaign store in P-town last summer, and various other things that will allow us to more or less eat our normal diet on the road.

Lovely Hartford. Got Insurance?

With regard to route, we are endlessly thankful that we were able to nearly entirely bypass the whole Southern Connecticut/New York City Area. While we love New York City, we do not at all love driving along the freeways near it. So, as you can see from the map above, we took 84 from Hartford, crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge, and then headed west. Despite passing through the New York City-ish bits around 5:00 PM, we did not hit ANY traffic jams. Hurray!!! We’re also equally delighted to not be driving on either the New Jersey Turnpike nor the Garden State Parkway, both of which are ALWAYS choked with cars, badly rutted, endlessly under construction, and generally frustrating. Oh, and they charge about $30 in tolls for the pleasure of it all. Today we only paid $4 in tolls.

Tappan Zee Bridge – GringoSuelto Crosses the Hudson

The truck has performed admirably. There are a couple little glitches, but nothing serious. We averaged almost 24 MPG, which is a record, and as soon as we can find some fuel injector cleaner, we’re hoping to nudge that up a smidgen more. Often times a car that is driven only in the city will see a notable improvement in fuel economy after several hundred freeway miles. Don’t ask me why, but it happened to my SLK after I drove to Raleigh and back the first time.

Mile Zero – Odometer in Our Driveway This Morning

Since everything is now packed, we anticipate getting an earlier start tomorrow. Today we managed 445 miles despite the late start, and spending some time at Trader Joe’s in Newton stocking up on food. Tomorrow we’re hoping to make it to Chattanooga, TN (609 miles), at which point all threat of snow and ice should be behind us. We are very fortunate that things finally came together when they did. Yesterday there was a snowstorm in the mid-Atlantic region, and it’s supposed to rain here tomorrow afternoon. It looks like we should escape bad weather all around.

As for adventure? Well…our plan is to make a beeline to the Yucatán, assuming we can keep driving. But when we passed through some of the old steel towns around here, we really wanted to stop and look around. Pennsylvania holds a lot of important industrial history for the USA, and we find that particularly fascinating. However, our friend, “C,” has decided he wants to meet us in Mexico and drive back together, so hopefully we’ll do that on the return leg. For now, we are quite thankful that there were no mechanical nor collision adventures.

Thanks for stopping by, and please note that if you are a new reader (I sent a note to a bunch of friends who weren’t aware of my blog), that your first comment will be held up in approval, but subsequent comments will post immediately. (Assuming you don’t say anything really nasty right off the bat, LOL.) And I’ll only be able to respond to comments once a day in all likelihood.

Saludos and thanks for stopping by!

P.S. The photos aren’t up to our normal standards as they were snapped with a cell phone while driving. And Photoshop can only do so much.